DNA reveals we are all genetic mutts...

DNA reveals we are all genetic mutts...

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Could there be a greater reason for MAGA's science denial?

What Are The Effects of Cognitive Dissonance?

In the moment, cognitive dissonance can cause discomfort, stress, and anxiety. And the degree of these effects often depends on how much disparity there is between the conflicting beliefs, how much the beliefs mean to that person, as well as with how well the person copes with self-contradiction.

https://www.psycom.net/cognitive-dissonance

PURE BLOODS AND UNICORNS - OH MY!

'Poisoning the blood of our country’: Trump ramps up anti-immigrant rhetoric

https://youtu.be/IZ6uzMTAVUw

Donald Trump spoke at Whittemore Center Arena on the campus of University of New Hampshire in Durham on Saturday. He slammed his opponents, taking swipes at Republican presidential primary nominees Nikki Haley and Chris Christie — whom Trump, not a poster child of fitness himself, called “a fat pig.” But Trump reserved most of his ire for President Joe Biden, who beat him four years ago in an election Trump refuses to accept was legitimate.

The former president also echoed the words of Adolf Hitler during his anti-immigrant ranting at the rally. “When they let — I think the real number is 15, 16 million people into our country — when they do that, we got a lot of work to do. They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” he said of immigrants coming into the United States. “That’s what they’ve done. They’ve poisoned mental institutions and prisons all over the world — not just in South America, not just the three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world. They’re coming into our country, from Africa, from Asia — all over the world. They’re pouring into our country.”

Trump evoking Hitler rhetoric comes days after he declared that he’ll act as a “dictator” should he be reelected, but only for “Day One.” As Rolling Stone reported this week, Trump also plans to send vast numbers of U.S. troops — potentially “hundreds of thousands” — to close the southern border and help build a network of immigrant detention camps should he serve a second term.

In October, Trump made similar Hitler-esque comments, as The Washington Post reports: “It is a very sad thing for our country,” Trump said. “It’s poisoning the blood of our country. It’s so bad, and people are coming in with disease. People are coming in with every possible thing that you could have.”

Trump added during an Iowa rally: “It’s the blood of our country; what they’re doing is destroying our country.”

In Mein Kampf, there are several passages where Hitler used the words “poison” and “blood” when attacking those he claimed to threaten the purity of the Aryan race, per The New York Times.

In one of the many instances Hitler referenced those words in Mein Kampf, he wrote of the Jews: “He poisons the blood of others but preserves his own blood unadulterated.”

Jason Stanley, a Yale professor and author of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them said Trump repeatedly utilizing the language Hitler used is hazardous.

“He is now employing this vocabulary in repetition in rallies. Repeating dangerous speech increases its normalization and the practices it recommends,” Stanley told Reuters. “This is very concerning talk for the safety of immigrants in the U.S.”

On Saturday, Trump also pointed out as a matter of pride that dictator Kim Jong Un is “fond” of him and not of Biden. “Who is very nice, I will tell you,” Trump said of the North Korean leader, adding, “He’s not so fond of this administration. But he’s fond of me. And we had a very good relationship.” He also praised China’s President Xi Jinping while claiming Biden “can’t put two sentences together” to negotiate with others, whereas Trump claimed he’d keep the U.S. out of World War III because of strength and because “Trump is always right,” speaking of himself in third person. “Can you imagine President Xi of China — powerful guy — they hate when I say that, ‘Oh, you say nice things’ … He controls 1.4 billion people rather ruthlessly, right? Can you imagine when he sees this guy walk into an office?”

Once again, Trump claimed the United States is running rampant with criminals and terrorists because we have “no borders,” adding, “they’re running wild in our Democrat-run cities while Christians and conservatives are persecuted, and thanks to Crooked Joe’s breathtaking weakness. He is bad, the worst president in the history the world.”

His extended bogeymen list this outing included other usual targets, as well, from sowing discord on the democratic process of voting to the “fake news media” and the “radical left Democrats” he blamed for a “rigged” 2020 election.

On Sunday, Trump heads to Reno, Nevada, for his next rally, and he will be in Waterloo, Iowa on Tuesday — his second visit to the state in a week.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-evokes-hitler-poison-blood-new-hampshire-rally-1234931357/

Geneticist David Reich discusses how migration shaped modern human populations.

Examination of ancient DNA can provide profound insights into human history, according to David Reich, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School. His talk at the Science Center on Wednesday, “A Tale of Two Subcontinents: The Parallel Prehistories of Europe and South Asia,” was drawn from his new book, “Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past,” showing what recent studies have revealed about the prehistory of Europe and southern Asia.

Reich “reshaped our understanding of human prehistory,” according to a New York Times profile last year, with the publication of DNA from the genomes of 938 ancient humans — more than all other research teams working in the field combined. This research, the story noted, has shed light on the spread of agriculture and the peopling of the planet.

Reich began his lecture by explaining how his work is done: With recent advances in DNA sequencing, it is now possible to extract sequences from humans who lived tens of thousands of years ago by grinding skeletal remains — specifically parts of the ear where much DNA is concentrated — into a powder to be examined.

“It’s similar to the introduction of microscopes,” Reich said. “We can now look at worlds that were never previously looked at. And when we look at ancient DNA from past worlds, the stories don’t conform to what we thought. The information that comes from sequencing the whole genome makes it possible to answer questions that are profoundly different, and more precise than ever before.” One phenomenon Reich set out to examine is the parallel histories of Europe and South Asia. Both regions saw the arrival of agriculture thousands of years ago, and they speak related Indo-European languages that eventually arrived in both regions. In both cases, the transformations happened through migration.

In Europe, Reich said, farmers arrived from Anatolia thousands of years ago and mixed with the local hunter-gatherer population; this is the largest source of ancestry in Europeans today. A second, later migration from the Eurasian Steppe happened at roughly the time Stonehenge was built. “People [from the Steppes] took advantage of two powerful inventions: the wheel and the domestication of the horse,” said Reich. “They were able to exploit the grasslands of the Steppes in a way that hadn’t been done before.” The Steppe migration resulted in a 90 percent replacement of the population.

A similar prehistory occurred in the Iberian Peninsula where a third population, also arrived from the Steppes, joined the hunter-gather and farmer groups. In this case, DNA research shows that the third population was exclusively male: While only 40 percent of the population about 6,000 years ago comes from the Steppes, 100 percent of the Y chromosomes do.

In India, a migration after the Ice Age caused a blending of two ancestries, called Ancestral North Indian and Ancestral South Indian. “People in India today are a mixture of two different portions of these ancestral populations,” Reich said. Genetics also show that India’s caste system, previously thought to have developed under colonial rule, was in place thousands of years earlier.

One question genetics can’t answer, he said in response to an audience question, is exactly how population replacement happened. “In the case of Britain after 6,000 years ago,” he asked, “did new people come in and kill the old ones, or just crowd them out? We just don’t know. What genetic data does is provide facts about movements of people and changes in groups. We are not the experts to describe how that happened.”

One important takeaway from this study, he said, is that humans inherently derive from mixed ancestry. “No population is, or ever could be, pure,” he said. “Ancient DNA reveals that the mixing of groups extremely different from each other is a common feature of human nature. We do not live in unusual times; profound events have occurred in our past. We should learn and feel more connected from that.”

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/02/harvard-geneticist-no-populations-dna-is-pure/

Interbreeding between archaic and modern humans

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archaic_and_modern_humans

DNA findings suggest post-agriculture influx, challenging prevailing view

The stock of modern Europeans, thought to arise from ancient hunter-gatherers and late-arriving Near Eastern farmers, also bears the mark of a mysterious third ancestral population, representing a large yet previously unknown migration into the region thousands of years ago.

Researchers from Harvard and the University of Tübingen in Germany said this week that the third line originated in northern Eurasia and left its signal in the DNA of nearly all modern Europeans.

The new ancestral band appears to have had a broad geographic reach, also leaving a genetic signature halfway around the world, in the DNA of modern Native Americans. In addition to the light it casts on European ancestry, the findings provide a piece to a genetic puzzle that emerged in 2012 when work on Native American DNA showed unexpected connections to modern Europeans.

The research was conducted by an international consortium led by scientists from the Harvard Medical School lab of Genetics Professor David Reich, who spearheaded the comparative DNA analysis, and Professor Johannes Krause at the University of Tübingen, who did the work of extracting the ancient DNA. It was published today in the journal Nature.

Reich said the research provides evidence that the prevailing view among archaeologists that there were no major influxes of new peoples into Europe after the advent of agriculture is wrong.

“Our evidence that Europeans today harbor ancestry that wasn’t present in the first farmers is important as it shows directly that there was a major movement of people into Europe after the advent of agriculture,” Reich said. “This motivates further ancient DNA work to try and figure out what archaeological cultures were responsible for bringing this ancestry.”

To conduct their analysis, researchers compared the DNA of 2,345 modern Europeans to that of a 7,000-year-old farmer from Germany and eight 8,000-year-old hunter-gatherers from Luxembourg and Sweden. Among other findings, researchers detected about 2 percent ancestry from Neanderthals in the ancients, about the level expected from prior research, Reich said. The research also included examining genetic sequences from more recent remains, including those of Otzi, “The Iceman,” a mummified 5,000-year-old man discovered in the Italian Alps in 1991.

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2014/09/a-mark-on-modern-europe/